soup
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Twitterers understand how the brain works…
… or at the very least, how pop science works! A lot of people believe some version of the ‘chemical soup’ story. I wrote an essay about it a few years ago: The Chemical Self and the Social Self.
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Why human memory is not a bit like a computer’s
My latest 3QD essay is about the mystery of human memory, and why it is not at all like computer memory. I discuss the quirks of human memory formation and recall, and the concept of “content-addressable memory”. 3quarksdaily: Why human memory is not a bit like a computer’s Here is an excerpt:
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“Authentic bio-gibberish”
It turns out that one of the 2017 Nobel Laureates is quite a character! “Jeffrey Hall, a retired professor at Brandeis University, shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries elucidating how our internal body clock works. He was honored along with Michael Young and his close collaborator Michael Roshbash. Hall said in an…
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The Tao that can be expressed
[This is an essay I wrote in 2008, on an old blog.] The following is the first part of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching — it’s my favourite piece of eastern philosophy. I’ve quoted it many times, ever since I started blogging, but I’ve never really written about my take on it. “The Tao that…
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What does the frontal lobe have to do with planning and decision-making?
I was asked the following question on Quora: Why is planning & decision making situated in the frontal lobe? Here’s my answer: